15
Donald took his notes and rode the lift to the cafeteria. He arrived to find it was too early for breakfast, but there was still coffee in the dispenser from the night before. He selected a chipped mug from the drying rack and filled it. A gentleman behind the serving line lifted the handle on an industrial washer, and the stainless steel box opened and let loose a cloud of steam. The man waved a dishrag at the cloud, then used the rag to pull out metal trays that would soon hold reconstituted eggs and slices of freeze-dried toast.
Donald tried the coffee. It was cold and weak, but he didn’t mind. It suited him. He nodded to the man prepping for breakfast, who dipped his head in response.
Donald turned and took in the view splayed across the wallscreen. Here was the mystery. The documents in his folders were nothing compared to this. He approached the dusky vista where swirling clouds were just beginning to glow from a sun rising invisibly beyond the hills. He wondered what was out there. People died when they were sent to clean. They died on the hills when silos were shut down. But he hadn’t. As far as he knew, the men who had dragged him back hadn’t either.
He studied his hand in the dim light leaking from the wallscreen. His palm seemed a little pink to him, a little raw. But then, he had scrubbed it half a dozen times in the sink the last few nights and each morning. The feeling that it’d been tainted couldn’t be shaken. But maybe it was his scrubbing that made it look red, that made it look like it needed even more scrubbing. He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and coughed into its folds.
“I’ll have potatoes ready in a few minutes,” the man behind the counter called out. Another worker in green coveralls emerged from the back, cinching an apron around his waist. Donald wanted to know who these people were, what their lives were like, what they thought about all this. For six months, they served three meals a day, and then hibernated for decades. Then they did it all over again. They must believe this is for some purpose, right? Or is this what any of them did for all their lives? Follow the tracks laid down yesterday. A boot in a hole, a boot in a hole, round and round. Did these men see themselves as deck hands on some great ark with a noble purpose? Or were they walking in circles simply because they knew the way?
Donald remembered running for Congress, thinking he was going to do real good for the future. And then he found himself in an office surrounded by a bewildering tempest of rules, memos, and messages, and he quickly learned to simply pray for the end of each day. He went from thinking he was going to save the world to passing the time until … until time ran out.
He sat down in one of the faded plastic chairs and studied the folder in his pink hand. It was two inches thick. Nichols, Juliette was written on the tab, followed by an ID number for internal purposes. He could still smell the toner from the printed pages. Seemed a waste, printing out so much nonsense. Somewhere, down in the vast storeroom, supplies were dwindling. And somewhere else, down the hall from his own office, a person was keeping track of it all, making sure there was just enough potatoes, just enough toner, just enough lightbulbs, to get them through to the end.
Donald glanced over the reports. He spread them out across the empty table and thought of Anna and his last shift as he did so, the way they had smothered that war room with clues. There was a pang of guilt and regret that Anna so often entered his thoughts before Helen. An affair hung but a long sleep ago, while his marriage had eroded to dust in a more distant past.
The reports were a welcome distraction while he awaited the sunrise and food. Here was a story about a cleaner who had been a sheriff, though not for long. One of the top reports in her folder was from the current Head of 18, a memo on this cleaner’s lack of qualifications. Donald read a list of reasons this woman should not be given a mantle of power, and it was as though he were reading about himself. It seemed the mayor of 18—a politician like Thurman—had wrangled this woman into the job, had recruited her despite objections. It wasn’t even clear that this woman, a mechanic from the lower levels, even wanted the job. In another report from the silo head, Donald read about her defiance, culminating in a walk out of sight and a refusal to clean. Again, it felt all too familiar to Donald. Or was he looking for these similarities? Isn’t that what people did? Saw in others what they feared to see or hoped to see in themselves?
The hills outside brightened by degrees. Donald glanced up from the reports and studied the mounds of dirt. He remembered the video feed he’d been shown of this cleaner disappearing over a similarly gray dune. Now the panic among his colleagues was that the residents of 18 would be filled with a dangerous sort of hope—the kind of hope that leads to violence. The far graver threat was that this cleaner had made it to another facility, that those in another silo might discover they were not alone.
Donald did not think it likely. She couldn’t have lasted long, and there was little to discover in the direction she had wandered. He pulled out the other folder, the one on Silo 17.
There had been no warning before its collapse, no uptick in violence. The population graphs appeared normal. He flipped through pages of typed documents from various division heads downstairs. Everyone had their theory, and of course each saw the collapse through the lens of their own expertise, or attributed it to the incompetence of another division. Population Control blamed a lax IT department. IT blamed a hardware failure. Engineering blamed programming. And the on-duty comm officer, who liaisons with IT and each individual silo head, thought it was sabotage, an attempt to prevent a cleaning.
Donald sensed something familiar about the breakdown of Silo 17, something he couldn’t place. The camera feeds had gone out, but not before a brief view of people spilling out of the airlock. There had been an exodus, a panic, a mass hysteria. And then a blackout. Comm had placed several calls. The first had been answered by the IT shadow, 17’s second in charge. There was a short exchange with this Russ fellow, questions fired from both ends, and then Russ had broken the connection.
The follow-up call went unanswered for hours. During this time, the silo went dark. And then someone else picked up the line.
Donald coughed into his handkerchief and read this strange exchange. The officer on duty claimed the respondent sounded young. It was a male, not a shadow nor the Head. A flurry of questions. One stood out to Donald. The person in 17, with only minutes left to live, had asked what was going on down on level forty.
Level forty. Donald didn’t need to grab a schematic to check—he had designed the facilities. He knew every level like the back of his hand. Level forty was a mixed-use level with half to housing, a quarter to light agriculture, the rest to commercial. What could be going on down there? And why would this person, who must’ve been at the limits of survival, care?
He read the exchange again. It almost sounded as though the young man’s last contact had been with level forty, as if he’d just spoken with them. Maybe he’d come from down there? It was only six levels away. Donald imagined a frightened boy storming up the stairwell with thousands of others. News of an opened airlock, of death below, people chasing upward. This young man gets to level thirty-four, and the crush of people is too much. IT has already emptied. He finds his way into the server room—
No. Donald shook his head. That wasn’t right. None of that felt right. What was it about this that nagged him?
It was the blackout. Donald felt a chill run up his spine. It was the number 40. It was the silo, not the level. The report trembled in his hands. He wanted to jump up and pace the cafeteria, but all he had was the germ of a connection, the hint of an outline. He fought to connect the dots before the ideas shooed away, disturbed by a rush of adrenaline.
It was Silo 40 he had spoken with. The boy had found himself at the back of 17’s comm station. He didn’t know it was a silo calling at all. That would be why he’d called it a level, had wondered what was happening down there. This blackout, this lack of contact, it was just like the silos Anna had been working on.
Anna—
Donald thought about the note she had left, asking Thurman to wake her. She was asleep below. She would know what to do. She should’ve been woken and put in charge, not him. He gathered the reports and papers and put them back into the proper folders. Workers were beginning to arrive from the lifts. The smells of eggs and biscuits floated out from the kitchen, the swinging doors pumping the aroma with the traffic of the bustling food staff, but Donald had forgotten his hunger.
He glanced up at the wallscreen. Would anyone on shift right now know of Silo 40? Maybe not. They wouldn’t have made the same connection. Thurman and the others had kept the outbreak a secret, didn’t want to cause a panic. But what if Silo 40 was still out there? What if they’d contacted 17? Anna said the master system had been hacked, that Silo 40 had hacked them. They had cut several facilities off from Silo 1 before Anna and Thurman had been awoken to terminate them all. But what if they hadn’t? What if this Silo 17 wasn’t destroyed? If it was still there, and this cleaner had stumbled into the bowl—
Donald had a sudden urge to go see for himself, to stroll outside and dash up to the top of the hill, suit be damned. He left the wallscreen and headed toward the airlock.
Perhaps he would need to wake Anna, just as Thurman had. He could set her up in the armory. There was a blueprint for doing this from his last shift, only he didn’t have anyone he could trust to help. He didn’t know the first thing about waking people up. But he was in charge, right? He could demand to know.
He left the cafeteria and approached the silo’s airlock, that great yellow door to the open world beyond. The outside wasn’t as bad as he had been led to believe. Unless he was simply immune. There were machines in his blood that kept him stitched up when he was frozen. Perhaps it was that. He approached the inner airlock door and peered through the small porthole. The memory of being in there struck him with sudden violence. He tucked the two folders under his elbow and rubbed his arm where the needle had bit into his flesh long ago, putting him to sleep. What was out there? The light spilling through the holding cell bars flickered as a dust cloud passed, and Donald realized how strange it was that they had a wallscreen in Silo 1. The people here knew what they’d done to the world. Why did they need to see the ruin they’d left behind?
Unless—
Unless the purpose was the same as for the other silos. Unless it was to keep them from going outside to see, a haunting reminder that the planet was not safe for them. But what did they really know beyond the silos? And how could a man hope to see for himself?